The Moneyless Man (24 page)

We’re a long, long way from living sustainably, let alone living without money. But more and more people are aware of the
future challenges facing humanity. Every year, more and more column inches in newspapers and magazines are devoted to environmental issues, and climate change stays at the top of the news. People really are making changes: some small, some huge, but in a more ecological direction. I know it will take time. But it’s vital to plant as many seeds as we can now, if we want our children to benefit from the fruit. Just because you won’t get to sit under the shade of the oak tree doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plant the acorn.

I got off the bench and walked north, out of the shopping mall, and looked back and smiled. Whatever happens – whether we embrace change or consume ourselves into oblivion – it is important to remember that, in the words of the legendary comedian Bill Hicks, ‘it’s just a ride’. Enjoy this gift for what it is, not for what you want it to be.

No matter what way of life you choose, lessons appear every day. The problem is, we’re not usually very receptive to them. Worse still, we often see the lessons as failures, hassles, or even disasters, rather than as a chance to learn something new. In
The Road Less Traveled
, M. Scott Peck said: ‘Life is difficult ... but once we truly understand and accept this ... then life is no longer difficult’. In some respects my year was difficult and in others it was the happiest time of my life. In the summer of my experiment, I’d accepted that life isn’t always meant to be ‘perfect’ and that I had no god-given right to everything this society tells me I could have. I surrendered to the fact that life was just the way it’s meant to be at all times: perfectly imperfect. After that, accepting the little hassles, the little
inconveniences that living without money inevitably throws your way, became fun.

My experiment was a complete change in how I lived. I learned more things in that year than in any twelve-month period I’d ever lived through. Some so subconsciously that I didn’t even know that I learned them.

One of the hardest things about moneyless living was the thought of what other people might think. I wasn’t so bothered about society in general, but I was worried that my parents would think I was throwing away everything I’d worked hard for. This concern turned out to be completely unfounded: the aspect of the year that I have felt happiest about was my parents’ reaction. I’m not sure what they thought about it at the beginning; we didn’t talk about it much. I’m lucky: even if they had disagreed with my stance – and they may well have – they’d have given me whatever support they could. It may have been hard for them to take at first. They’d watched me work thirty hours a week for four years to pay my way through my degree, and they’d helped me out a lot along the way. Now they watched me renounce it all.

It’s been interesting for me to watch them go on their journey since I started along my path. At the beginning, I’d ranted on, telling them how everything they were doing was wrong, how my opinion was right, and how they needed to change. Understandably, this erected walls, defenses through which none of us could properly communicate. But it was I who needed to change. What made my opinion more correct than theirs – or anyone else’s for that matter? I stopped my pestering. It seems children’s pester-power only works if they are trying to get their parents to buy more, not less.

About six months after my decision to leave them in peace, I noticed small changes. One time, my mom phoned to tell me she and dad had decided to become vegetarian. Another, she rang to say that she was going to stop buying so much stuff. Just by me providing information, with no judgment or claim to rightness, my folks started to question things themselves. Not because I was telling them to, but because they wanted to. Eventually, they got right behind my moneyless plans and life. There’s no sign they’re going to join me on the path, but they are constantly questioning how they live their lives and are making little changes almost weekly. They’ve offered to help in any way they can with the setting up of the community. I don’t expect them to live like me, just as they don’t expect me to live like them. They’ve given me lessons about what it takes for us to co-exist on this planet.

I would never recommend not standing up for what you believe because of what other people might think. But I am beginning to realize I have no right to criticize others for flaws we all have, or have had. It is much more constructive to support each other in making even the smallest change that is positive for the whole planet. This way, walls get demolished, and we can have a proper dialogue.

I would love to live in a moneyless world. No doubt about it, that is my ideal. But while I will work and move in this world as if that were a real possibility, the realist in me knows it isn’t going to happen, at least not in my lifetime. The overwhelming majority of people have no desire to give up money: they think it is a very useful tool. And many of those who would like to give up money have told me, repeatedly, they don’t believe they could.

The support I received over the year, both from the media and the public, has given me so much hope for the future. I truly
believe that we can make the changes that the world’s ecologists believe we need to make. One change I believe we can make, one that is realistic, if not imperative, is to move to local currencies. A local currency operates purely within a town, village or small area. In the UK, examples include the Totnes and Lewes Pounds, but there are examples in other countries. Local currencies aren’t legal tender, more a kind of formalized barter, in which produce or skills are traded for an agreed amount of local currency, which the receiver can then ‘spend’. Local currencies aim to keep ‘money’ circulating in a community, build relationships between producers and consumers, get people thinking about where and how they spend the currency, and encourage local businesses and trading. While users of local currencies must still partake, to varying degrees, in the global economy, local currencies are a huge step towards re-localization of economies.

Local currency is based on exchange and therefore doesn’t have some of the deeper benefits that I believe pay-it-forward economics could have, but to me, it’s a good half-way house. Local currencies are a fantastic method of reducing the degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed; users of local currencies have a much fuller appreciation of the processes of production and whether the producers’ needs are being met. If some communities could make a complete transition from the current monetary system, this would be a sustainable model of living that other communities could copy.

When people learn that I live without money, most assume that I must be almost completely ‘self-sufficient’. That was my plan, but I quickly learned that independence is one of the biggest myths in modern society. At the very least, we depend on bees, earthworms, and micro-organisms just to survive. Not only did I
realize that I couldn’t become completely self-sufficient even if I had wanted to, I also realized that I had no desire to be; some of the greatest happiness in my life comes from the relationships I have with people in my community. What I believe works best – and what I find most desirable – is for small numbers of people to work interdependently, together building ‘communal-sufficiency’.

Robin Dunbar, the British evolutionary biologist, has studied the tribe size of non-human primates, from which he has developed his description of the ‘Dunbar Number’. He estimates that humans can maintain stable social relationships with approximately 150 people. These communities can be streets, suburbs or towns. Around this size, I believe communities can benefit from the economies of scale that come into play as we produce things for larger and larger numbers, without causing the ecologies-of-industrialization that arise when that scale becomes so large that it becomes inherently unsustainable. Because I lived my year in relative isolation, I had to do most things myself. To cook my dinner, I needed to gather and chop the wood, gather and chop the food, feed the rocket stove for thirty minutes, serve up, and wash the dishes. If this had been an interdependent process, I would only have had to do one or two parts, giving me time to relax or do something creative. The beautiful thing is that you don’t need money when you live within a community – you bring what you can; your reputation, in a way, becomes your currency. The more you give, the more you’ll find that you receive. That has been my experience, anyway.

Before I started my year I believed that the most important skills I’d need to live ecologically and without money would be
things like carpentry, vegetable-growing, permaculture design, medicine, clothes-making and repairing, cooking, bushcraft, and teaching. I still believe they are absolutely essential to moneyless living, especially if we want to create a self-sustaining community. However, I would now call these ‘secondary skills’. I believe that physical fitness, self-discipline, genuine care and respect for the planet and the species that live on it, and the ability to give and share, are the ‘primary skills’ for this way of living. Without at least some of these skills, it is not a way of life you can either embark on or sustain. At the community level, it’s not quite so important that everyone is physically fit; many jobs don’t need it. And if somebody becomes sick, there are others around to help. But the healthier and fitter the individuals involved are, the better. They’ll enjoy it a lot more, as a lot of the fun stuff involves being active outdoors.

I cannot over-emphasize how un-skilled a human being I am. I am ordinary beyond belief. But if I can live this way, many people also could, if they really wanted to; and most people would probably be a lot better at it than I. As long as the will to do it is in there somewhere, the rest is a matter of education and practice. It’s much easier to teach somebody how to plant a seed than to convince them of the need to plant it.

From the moment we are born, most of us are taught that money, not community, is our primary source of personal security. It’s perfectly understandable that most people have taken to protecting what they already have; otherwise, if things go badly, what are they going to fall back on?

One of the first, and most important, lessons I was taught by moneyless living was to trust life. I firmly believe that if we live each day in the spirit of giving, we’ll receive whatever we need
whenever we need it. I’ve long since stopped trying to explain this intellectually; it comes from feeling and from life’s experience. Getting a free trailer after selling my houseboat to pay for the Freeconomy website was a major example, but many little things happened daily. On many evenings, I’d cycle from house to house on my way home from the city, dropping off food – to friends and people who needed it – that I couldn’t eat myself. Other evenings, I’d find myself in the city, hungry after the cycle in but having forgotten to take food with me, only to meet a friend or acquaintance in the street who’d invite me for dinner.

My experience has been that when you give freely, with no thought of what you’ll get in return, you receive freely, without fail. It’s an organic flow of giving and receiving, a magical dance that our entire ecosystem is based on. But it requires a leap of faith, and placing trust in nature to provide for your needs. Christians call it ‘reaping what you sow’, Buddhists call it ‘karma’, and atheists call it ‘common sense’.

Take this for an example: let’s put ourselves in a group of thirty friends. We decide that we are going to be aware of each others’ needs and do our best to meet them if we can. Each person in the group now has thirty people looking after their best interests. However, if each of us decided to go back to living as most of us do today, thinking mostly about ourselves, we’d only have one person looking after our best interests – ourselves.

If we put a bit more love, respect, and care into the world, I believe we will all benefit from a world with more love, care, and respect in it. It’s not a complicated theory. Staying in the flow of giving and receiving freely is a challenge. I don’t always succeed. But the times when I’m in that flow are my happiest. Life seems easy, there is no resistance, no swimming against the tide. Trusting in life to supply whatever you need is, for me, complete
liberation. It frees you from worry and enables you to do whatever it is you really want to do.

Throughout my year, many people suggested I could only live without money because others live with it. ‘How would you have a road to cycle on if there weren’t money and I didn’t pay my taxes?’ It’s an understandable argument, but it’s based on the underlying assumption that you need money to create things. An assumption that is, I believe, fundamentally flawed.

I have come to learn, more and more, that using money is just one way of doing things. It is a way of apportioning reward to those who help build the road, but it is completely unnecessary for the road’s construction. Money allows you to use labor that isn’t local; the road’s asphalt will almost always be made by people far away. Living moneyless forces us to obtain the materials we need locally; it forces us to take responsibility for meeting our community’s needs; it forces us to have more appreciation for what we use. It also forces us to use local labor—something I feel is absolutely vital to successfully tackling critical issues such as peak oil and climate change. There is no reason why local people cannot build whatever roads and paths they need. If we devolved decision-making to communities, what would there be to stop local people coming together to create whatever they need? Nothing more than a change in perspective.